Come help us celebrate the tenth edition of Monash University's creative writing annual, featuring a selection of established and emerging authors from Australia and around the world, including John Tranter, Heiko Julien, Anders Villani and Coral Bracho.

The winning entries of the 2014 Monash Prize awarded by the Emerging Writers Festival are also featured.

'We are putting the world on notice: we are here; we are writing; and we want your attention. If you’re not willing to give us your attention, then we will take it from you. We will be heard. Are you listening?’ – from the Guerrilla Poetry Manifesto

How do we create a poetic form that increases the species-diversity of a habitat? How can we prompt a whole city to read poetry? How do we place poetry at the heart of what we do and who we are? In this guest lecture, the first Alliance Professor of Writing David Morley presents examples and challenges that will surprise and delight. From poetry-bombing a clothes store to poetry-bombing a city, from blending poems into the life-cycle of birds to swimming a poem along a river, David’s own creations are imbued with a high idea content about the dynamics of ecology (he is a trained zoologist as well as a poet). His conceptual works are created from the artistic fusion of poetic and sculptural elements with those of the natural landscape. John Clare declared that he ‘found the p\oems in fields and only wrote them down’. Morley, the poetic biographer of Clare in The Gypsy and the Poet (Carcanet, 2013), takes this process a step sideways by creating poems and folding them back into the natural world.

Biography

David Morley was trained as an ecologist and carried out a substantial research project on acid rain before Margaret Thatcher shut down his laboratory. Fortunately David was also writing poetry and won an Eric Gregory Award a few months after losing his job. Morley’s poetry collections include The Gypsy and the Poet (Carcanet, 2013), a PBS Recommendation, and Biographies of Birds and Flowers: Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2014). He published Enchantment (Carcanet 2011), a Sunday Telegraph Book of the Year chosen by Jonathan Bate. The Invisible Kings (Carcanet, 2007) was a PBS Recommendation and TLS Book of the Year chosen by Les Murray. He writes for The Guardian and Poetry Review. He was one of the judges of the 2012 T.S. Eliot Prize and is judging the 2013 Foyle Young Poets of the Year. He has won fourteen writing awards and is Professor of Writing at Warwick University and Alliance Chair of Writing at Monash University.

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

6 for 6.30pm

Collected Works

35-37 Swanston St

Nicholas Building, Level 1

David Morley’s poetry collections include The Gypsy and the Poet (Carcanet, 2013) and Biographies of Birds and Flowers: Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2014). He published Enchantment (Carcanet 2011), a Sunday Telegraph Book of the Year chosen by Jonathan Bate. The Invisible Kings (Carcanet, 2007) was a PBS Recommendation and TLS Book of the Year chosen by Les Murray. He is Professor of Writing at Warwick University and Alliance Chair of Writing at Monash University.

Will Eaves is the author of three novels, one work of experimental fiction and a volume of poetry. From 1995 to 2011 he was the Arts Editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Warwick, and currently lives in Melbourne, where he is writing a novel about the possibility of artificial intelligence.

Gig Ryan's New and Selected Poems (Giramondo 2011), also published in the UK, collects work from over three decades, and has been shortlisted for both the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and the Prime Minister's Literary Awards. Gig is the author of six previous volumes: The Division of Anger (1981), Manners of an Astronaut (1984), The Last Interior (1986), Excavation (1990), Pure and Applied (1998), and Heroic Money (2001). She has been awarded the C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry in 1999, and the FAW Anne Elder Poetry Award.

Australia’s leading verse-novelist, Alan Wearne emerged from the Monash Poetry Readings of the late-1960s; his work focuses on the outer-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, especially Blackburn South. Alan’s many books include The Nightmarkets, which won the Banjo Award; The Lovemakers, which won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and the Arts Queensland Judith Wright Calanthe Award; and The Lovemakers: Book Two, Money and Nothing, which co-won The Foundation for Australian Literary Studies’ Colin Roderick Award and the H. T. Priestly Medal. His most recent collection, Prepare the Cabin for Landing, appeared with Giramondo press in 2013. Alan will be reading from his new work for this special event.

Please join us for a reading and discussion by leading English poet and critic John Wilkinson

Monday, July 14

3pm - 4.30pm
Room E561, Menzies Building
Clayton Campus
Presented by the Network for Literary and Cultural Studies
All Welcome

John Wilkinson is an English poet born in London and growing up in Cornwall and Devon. He was educated at Cambridge where he was taught most consequentially by J.H. Prynne. He now lives in Chicago, where he teaches in the Department of English and the Committee on Creative Writing at the University of Chicago, following an earlier appointment at the University of Notre Dame. His previous career in the UK took him from psychiatric nursing in Birmingham to teaching Community Care in Swansea, to public health in the East End of London. He has published six collections of poetry with Salt and a collection of critical essays, mainly on recent British poetry. He has subsequently published several critical essays on New York School poets, and lately has turned his attention to W.S. Graham and Dylan Thomas. His most recent book of poetry is Reckitt’s Blue from Seagull Books; and a new long poem, Courses Matter-Woven, will be published as a pamphlet by Equipage in 2014. John Wilkinson’s writing has received extensive critical commentary, including a conference at Sussex University, and he has read and lectured widely in the US, UK, Australia, China and Tibet.

Please join us for a reading and discussion by this internationally renowned Australian poet

Monday 12th May 2014

2pm-4pmRoom E561, Menzies BuildingClayton CampusAll welcome

John Tranter has published over twenty books of poetry and a book of experimental fiction, Different Hands. His latest major works are Starlight: 150 Poems (University of Queensland Press, 2010), which won the 2011 Age Poetry Book of the Year and the 2011 Queensland Premier’s Award, and Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected (University of Queensland Press, 2006), which won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for poetry in 2006, the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for poetry in 2007, the South Australian award for poetry in 2008 and the 2008 South Australia Premier’s Prize for the best book overall published in 2006 and 2007. He has compiled four anthologies of other writers’ work totalling over 1,500 pages, including co-editing the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991). He has made more than twenty reading and lecture tours to the USA, the UK and Europe.

John Tranter worked as a publisher’s senior education editor in Singapore, and as a radio drama and features producer, directing over forty radio plays and features for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as well as managing a weekly two-hour national radio arts feature for some years. In 1997 he founded the free Internet literary magazine Jacket (http://jacketmagazine.com/), and in 2004 he founded the Australian Poetry Resources Internet Library (APRIL), the recipient (in 2006) of a half-million-dollar Australian Research Council Linkage Grant to the Department of English at the University of Sydney.

Damon Krukowski from Exact Change Press will be discussing theEuropean avant garde contribution to literary Modernism, and the roleof specialist publishers in disseminating this work toEnglish-language readers. Along with other publishers, such as AtlasPress, Green Integer, and Dalkey Archive, Exact Change has provided anexpanded view of the Modernist tradition, realigning the prevailingorthodoxy of the Anglo-American canon for a generation of readers.